Help

Newsletter

Stand Your Ground law needs serious revision or repeal

The evidence continues to pile up: When people carry guns in public, someone is apt to get killed. Someone else is apt to go to jail. Lives are likely to be destroyed.

The more people who are packing heat, the more likely that minor confrontations will turn deadly.

Such killings are all the more likely in Florida, which has issued more than 900,000 permits to carry concealed weapons, far more than any other state.

In 2005, Florida became the first state to pass a Stand Your Ground law, which appears to have intensified the climate that has led to the nickname “Gunshine State.”

Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature should revise or repeal the Stand Your Ground law, but that appears unlikely anytime soon.

It is clear that the law is being misinterpreted on a grand scale.

Carrying guns in public is encouraged by the rhetoric, the myths and the lunatic notions that are generated by the gun manufacturing industry, which profits when gun sales go up.

Some people carry a gun out of fear — even though crime is the lowest it has been in decades.

Others buy and carry guns for many other reasons, seemingly with little regard for the potential consequences.

The latest tragedyFew should have been surprised at the events that unfolded when 45-year-old Michael Dunn, in town for his son’s wedding, happened upon 17-year-old Jordan Russell Davis and some other youths who were playing loud music in an SUV at a Gate station on Southside Boulevard.

Words were exchanged, the teenager was slain in a hail of bullets and now Dunn is in jail charged with second-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder.

One obvious question, which a jury may get to consider, is whether Dunn acted differently because he had his gun. Many of us are annoyed by loud music in vehicles, but most of us simply endure it and move on.

Does it seem reasonable that a person armed with a gun might be more emboldened to approach the SUV and complain or make inflammatory remarks?

And does the Stand Your Ground law further embolden some who carry guns?

That law expanded the “Castle Doctrine,” which allows use of deadly force to protect one’s home, to also give citizens the right to use deadly force anywhere that they have a right to be if they “reasonably believe” use of deadly force is necessary for self-defense.

Further, the law now eliminates the duty to retreat even if that is an option in such situations.

In the Davis killing, Dunn’s lawyer says someone in the SUV had a shotgun and Dunn felt threatened, indicating that the Stand Your Ground law has yet another defendant.

Could simply imagining a danger turn into a justification for killing?

Carroll dutifully conducted hearings around the state, but the task force was stacked with proponents of the Stand Your Ground law, and there was never much chance that the group would propose serious changes.

A long line of law enforcement officers and prosecutors opposed the law before it was enacted and have expressed deep concerns about it since, but their objections have fallen on deaf ears.

Surge in justifiable homicidesResearchers have determined that “justifiable homicides” have increased dramatically since the law was passed. Of nearly 200 Stand Your Ground cases examined by the Tampa Bay Times, the majority resulted in a fatality.

“The consequences of the law have been devastating around the state,” Tallahassee State Attorney Willie Meggs told The New York Times earlier this year. “It is almost insane what we are having to deal with.”

Following drug-related shootings, domestic killings and road rage shootings, prosecutors sometimes must drop cases because they can’t determine the shooter’s state of mind as to whether they felt threatened.

Previously, such cases would have gone to a jury to determine validity of self-defense claims.

Unfortunately, Carroll’s brief report offers few insights and recommends little more than a few changes in definitions and increased training about the law.

Even a suggestion by the law’s critics to collect data on its effects was ignored. The report can be seen at http://bit.ly/Qt7vNq.

In the academic world, the report would receive an F or an incomplete. A more thorough examination is still justified.

How many more? Back in Jacksonville, Dunn’s lawyer, Robin Lemonidis of Melbourne, said she is focused on “making sure that what has become a tragic situation does not become a media circus like another Florida case has because this is totally different.”

Totally different? Not at all.

And the parallels don’t stop with two black teenagers being shot to death after being approached by white men who later claim self-defense.

The two cases have in common that when people carry guns and get into garden variety altercations, then all-too-often somebody dies, somebody goes to jail and lives are destroyed.

As for the media circus, this won’t be the last one.

That’s because so long as Scott and Carroll and their cohorts in the Legislature act so callously about Florida’s gun laws, the needless killings will continue, and people will feel like it isn’t safe to stop at a Gate station — because it isn’t.